(From left to right) Assoc Prof Praveen Linga and PhD student Zheng Rong Chong in the backdrop of the state-of-the-art experimental facility in NUS Engineering measuring gas and water production from synthetic natural gas hydrates cores.

One paper published by an NUS Engineering research team has been listed as “Top 25 most highly cited Research and Review papers” in Applied Energy Journal. This constitutes the top 2 per cent of more than 1600 papers in the Elsevier’s Journal of Applied Energy, published in 2016. Applied Energy is a leading journal for applied research concerning energy and engineering fields of research.

Titled Review of natural gas hydrates as an energy resource: Prospects and challenges (Volume 107, pages 1633-1652), the award-winning paper was published in January 2016. It was co-authored by Mr Zheng Rong Chong, Mr She Hern Bryan Yang, Dr Ponnivalavan Babu, and supervised by Associate Professor Praveen Linga, Department of Chemical & Biomolecular Engineering, in collaboration with Professor Xiaosen Li of the Key Laboratory of Gas Hydrate, Guangzhou Institute of Energy Conversion, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Guangzhou, China. The paper has been cited 110 times with a field weighted citation index of 28.53 (from Scopus database as of 14-Aug-2017).

Natural gas hydrates are ice-like solid compound formed by a combination of natural gas and water. They are abundantly available in nature and is considered a future resource for natural gas. Since the 1960s, the natural occurrence of hydrates has been found in permafrost and the continental margin. The key reason for the interest on gas hydrates is that the natural gas stored in hydrate form is more than twice of that in conventional gas fields.

This invited review paper provided a comprehensive background on gas hydrate research pertaining to energy recovery, including the resource estimates, recovery techniques, laboratory scale research, as well as field trials, and prospected the limitation and challenges to be overcome to realise energy recovery from hydrates.

In recognition of their efforts and contribution to Applied Energy, the authors of the paper are invited to the International Conference on Applied Energy (ICAE2017) in Cardiff, UK (21 to 24 August 2017), where they will be presented with the ‘2016 Applied Energy Awards’ certificate and a plaque during the special event.